Microsoft are not the biggest worry when it comes to patents... Sure they will talk and talk, but they wont actually do anything. They have as much to lose from ridiculous software patents as anyone else. If microsoft start suing people over patents, then a large number of companies will start suing them back, including big companies like ibm and sun, which could have significant impact upon microsoft's products.
The biggest risk, comes from the small companies who have a few patents but no products. They have nothing to lose, you cant sue them because they dont have any products anyway, their entire business is litigation.
Lets not forget all the problems the american space shuttles have had recently, while the russian soyuz capsules have been working well for many years.
That assumes that his product is innovative enough and large enough that it's cheaper for the large company to buy him out than to clone it... In many cases a larger company can produce an inferior clone (word vs wordperfect) and use their existing marketshare in another area to make their inferior product take over, so it's often not even necessary to work that hard on a clone.
Exactly, and even big companies can go belly up leaving their users in the lurch, just in the IT industry alone we have:
Commodore - Went bankrupt DEC - Nearly went bankrupt, got bought out and pulled apart Worldcom - Major accounting scandal Sinclair - went bankrupt, got bought out by Amstrad who pretty much moved out of the computer business Atari - nearly went bankrupt, dropped most of their products and moved to just producing games SGI - went bankrupt, twice, had to drop most of their products
Being open is not just an idealistic issue, it's also a valid technical and business concern. If your data is stuck on a proprietary filesystem, you may find yourself in a situation where you cannot read your own data, even if the data itself is stored in standard formats. I would never risk my business to a proprietary filesystem for this reason. I will only use an FS that's openly documented and supported by several os's.
But as a small developer, he's pretty screwed anyway... If his product becomes popular, it's likely to get cloned either by a larger company selling a commercial version, or by a group of enthusiasts making a free version. Either way, he has no control over the situation and the clones will ultimately take over because they have more developers and in the case of the commercial company, greater marketting clout.
If it fails to become popular, he will eventually tire of maintaining it for little/no profit, and it will die off... The few customers he does have, will be screwed.
If he opens it, and it fails to become popular he's no worse off than if he left it closed. However, the few customers he does get are better off, because when he gets tired of pushing an unsuccessful product and gives up, they still have the code and can maintain it in their little niche.
If he opens it and it becomes popular, he will attract more developers who will help improve the code. He is still in a good position to provide support, and bundled ready to go versions. Especially if the software is tied to a piece of hardware he produces, as people will buy the hardware to hack on it. Even if his software is available for free, many companies and end users will buy a commercially supported version instead of the free version anyway. Conversely, an increasing number of businesses will not buy a product that is tied to a single supplier, because of the risks of losing support if that supplier disappears.
It's installed by default and not easy to remove (safari is easy to uninstall on OSX, and you can choose not to have it when you install the OS) It's support for web standards is way behind other browsers, and this has resulted in a massive stagnation of the web. It's a relatively simple and featureless browser in it's default state
The bundling doesnt bother me, so long as its possible to deselect it during install as well as remove it post-install. It should also be possible for third party distributors to remove it from their OEM installs and recovery media, and replace it with their own choice of browser (and yes, apple could do with having some third party distributors in the first place).
Well, seeing as their make no money from CD sales, perhaps the artists should openly distribute their music for free on the internet. It wont cost them much, they can use p2p so they have very little bandwidth costs. Each download will serve as an advert for their merchandise, live shows etc. Artists wouldnt lose out, because they make no money anyway. Not to mention all the new fans it would attract: A lot of people would never download pirated music, and wouldnt want to waste their money buying a CD from a band they'd never heard of (it may not be a waste, but how are you to know before you listen?). If these people can download legit music for free, they can listen to lots of new acts they wouldnt otherwise have experienced. This way, the legit user would gain the same advantages pirates have had for years. Not to mention that, a lot of people who bought CDs anyway did so because they thought they were supporting the artists, the money they save is more likely to be spent on other things associated with the artists they like.
We used wordperfect in school, now that i have left school i find that noone uses wordperfect in the workplace. Those who learn word in school today will probably be using something totally different by the time they enter the workplace anyway. Atleast for them, whatever they end up using will almost certainly be an improvement, to someone taught on wordperfect word is a huge step down.
Only because of it's simplicity... Why did microsoft create their own format (BMP) when there were already a large amount of popular widely used image formats available (PCX, Targa, TIFF, ILBM etc), all of which offer optional compression which while not being great, is certainly better than BMP's no compression? Would it not have been easier to just pick an existing format? Their sound format (wave/wav) aswell, what did it offer that existing formats (AIFF, Voice/voc, 8svx, 16svx) didnt? And what made these existing formats too hard for microsoft to implement? Most of them are just raw PCM data with a header appended that specifies the sample rate and bits per sample, wave included.
Removing ipv6 support requires deleting the ipv6 module (assuming your kernel has ipv6 compiled as a module, which most distributions do), although it is also possible to remove it by recompiling the kernel. As for the avahi dependencies, this is an issue with the way ubuntu is packaged rather than an issue with linux as a whole, and stems from other packages which *use* features from avahi being compiled and linked against it. My gentoo systems don't have avahi installed at all, infact i had to go and check what avahi was.
That disables it, but doesnt remove it. You can easily remove the ipv6.ko file and it's gone completely... It wouldnt be hard for distributions to split the kernel modules up into several packages.
They want windows desktops and servers to interoperate with linux servers... Why? because linux has a significant server marketshare, and they are FORCED to interoperate with it or face losing marketshare themselves. Linux however has very little desktop market share, so it's more profitable for microsoft to ignore it and thus make it harder for people to migrate to linux.
Ever noticed how a lot of the interoperability between windows and other os's centers around those os's implementing proprietary protocols from windows, rather than windows implementing standards from other os's. There have been a few other cases where microsoft have been forced to implement standards to interoperate (tcp/ip, image formats etc) but they have always preferred to force their own proprietary implementations on people if they will stick (netbeui, bmp etc).
It is, not only disable but also remove. On unix this is easy, because everything typically comes as seperate packages which are easily uninstalled. Windows however, makes it difficult if not impossible to remove many things which are often not required at all.
On the contrary, they should check for the presence of the appropriate feature, and then use it... They should also let you build binaries without those fallback code paths, as a lot of code will never run on older machines (eg x86 macs, which all have at least sse3). If someone's system lock up because AMD claimed to support a feature which they dont actually support, that's AMD's fault and intel could claim the moral high ground instead of the other way round.
Not to mention that a significant portion of open source software originally designed for linux/bsd will run perfectly well on osx. Aside from OSX itself, i dont think i have a single third party piece of software on my mac that wasn't freely downloadable.
The macbook pro uses an ATI chipset... When running Linux on the macbook pro i also couldn't get dual head working, so there's definately an issue with the linux drivers.
It can include PNG, PDF or EPS format images... Jpeg being a lossy format wouldnt really be suitable, its ok for real life photos but a very poor format for representing artificial constructs like graphs. Also, bitmapped images will look poor when printed on a high resolution printer, although you can include a huge image and latex will scale it down appropriately.
Most linux distributions are compiled for i686 nowadays... And those that are not, typically include multiple versions of kernel and glibc packages for different processor types. Then you have distributions like gentoo, which are compiled for whatever cpu you happen to have. Also there is OSX, which is compiled for a core duo (the lowest common denominator among intel macs). Not to mention any 64bit binaries, the lowest common denominator for which is an athlon64.
As for optimizing on the fly with java, I usually leave azureus running for days on end... It's still sluggish, and yet native apps still run fine.
I have yet to see any java application that outperforms a similar one written in C, even if it has been compiled for a generic 386. Compiling specifically for the CPU just increases the gap, and modern compilers arent even very good at making use of sse/2/3 etc.
I did the same thing, amiga with 68060 emulating a mac... A lot of apps hadn't been fully ported at the time, and significant parts of macos were still not ported either, so in many cases the 68060 outperformed the ppc based macs of the time too. Also remember that, the 68060's raw performance is often better than the first revision of the powerpc chips (the 601).
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Microsoft are not the biggest worry when it comes to patents...
Sure they will talk and talk, but they wont actually do anything. They have as much to lose from ridiculous software patents as anyone else. If microsoft start suing people over patents, then a large number of companies will start suing them back, including big companies like ibm and sun, which could have significant impact upon microsoft's products.
The biggest risk, comes from the small companies who have a few patents but no products. They have nothing to lose, you cant sue them because they dont have any products anyway, their entire business is litigation.
Lets not forget all the problems the american space shuttles have had recently, while the russian soyuz capsules have been working well for many years.
That assumes that his product is innovative enough and large enough that it's cheaper for the large company to buy him out than to clone it...
In many cases a larger company can produce an inferior clone (word vs wordperfect) and use their existing marketshare in another area to make their inferior product take over, so it's often not even necessary to work that hard on a clone.
Exactly, and even big companies can go belly up leaving their users in the lurch, just in the IT industry alone we have:
Commodore - Went bankrupt
DEC - Nearly went bankrupt, got bought out and pulled apart
Worldcom - Major accounting scandal
Sinclair - went bankrupt, got bought out by Amstrad who pretty much moved out of the computer business
Atari - nearly went bankrupt, dropped most of their products and moved to just producing games
SGI - went bankrupt, twice, had to drop most of their products
Being open is not just an idealistic issue, it's also a valid technical and business concern.
If your data is stuck on a proprietary filesystem, you may find yourself in a situation where you cannot read your own data, even if the data itself is stored in standard formats.
I would never risk my business to a proprietary filesystem for this reason. I will only use an FS that's openly documented and supported by several os's.
But as a small developer, he's pretty screwed anyway...
If his product becomes popular, it's likely to get cloned either by a larger company selling a commercial version, or by a group of enthusiasts making a free version. Either way, he has no control over the situation and the clones will ultimately take over because they have more developers and in the case of the commercial company, greater marketting clout.
If it fails to become popular, he will eventually tire of maintaining it for little/no profit, and it will die off... The few customers he does have, will be screwed.
If he opens it, and it fails to become popular he's no worse off than if he left it closed. However, the few customers he does get are better off, because when he gets tired of pushing an unsuccessful product and gives up, they still have the code and can maintain it in their little niche.
If he opens it and it becomes popular, he will attract more developers who will help improve the code. He is still in a good position to provide support, and bundled ready to go versions. Especially if the software is tied to a piece of hardware he produces, as people will buy the hardware to hack on it.
Even if his software is available for free, many companies and end users will buy a commercially supported version instead of the free version anyway. Conversely, an increasing number of businesses will not buy a product that is tied to a single supplier, because of the risks of losing support if that supplier disappears.
My objections to IE are:
It's installed by default and not easy to remove (safari is easy to uninstall on OSX, and you can choose not to have it when you install the OS)
It's support for web standards is way behind other browsers, and this has resulted in a massive stagnation of the web.
It's a relatively simple and featureless browser in it's default state
The bundling doesnt bother me, so long as its possible to deselect it during install as well as remove it post-install. It should also be possible for third party distributors to remove it from their OEM installs and recovery media, and replace it with their own choice of browser (and yes, apple could do with having some third party distributors in the first place).
NTFS is not open...
The journaling support was introduced in version 5, which shipped with windows 2000...
Can't speak for posix compatibility tho
Well, seeing as their make no money from CD sales, perhaps the artists should openly distribute their music for free on the internet.
It wont cost them much, they can use p2p so they have very little bandwidth costs. Each download will serve as an advert for their merchandise, live shows etc. Artists wouldnt lose out, because they make no money anyway. Not to mention all the new fans it would attract:
A lot of people would never download pirated music, and wouldnt want to waste their money buying a CD from a band they'd never heard of (it may not be a waste, but how are you to know before you listen?). If these people can download legit music for free, they can listen to lots of new acts they wouldnt otherwise have experienced.
This way, the legit user would gain the same advantages pirates have had for years. Not to mention that, a lot of people who bought CDs anyway did so because they thought they were supporting the artists, the money they save is more likely to be spent on other things associated with the artists they like.
In the US maybe, here in europe even law firms are locked in to word.
We used wordperfect in school, now that i have left school i find that noone uses wordperfect in the workplace.
Those who learn word in school today will probably be using something totally different by the time they enter the workplace anyway.
Atleast for them, whatever they end up using will almost certainly be an improvement, to someone taught on wordperfect word is a huge step down.
Only because of it's simplicity...
Why did microsoft create their own format (BMP) when there were already a large amount of popular widely used image formats available (PCX, Targa, TIFF, ILBM etc), all of which offer optional compression which while not being great, is certainly better than BMP's no compression?
Would it not have been easier to just pick an existing format?
Their sound format (wave/wav) aswell, what did it offer that existing formats (AIFF, Voice/voc, 8svx, 16svx) didnt? And what made these existing formats too hard for microsoft to implement? Most of them are just raw PCM data with a header appended that specifies the sample rate and bits per sample, wave included.
Because if its not being used, it shouldnt be installed.
Windows: A few clicks of the mouse to *disable* ipv6... /lib/modules/`uname -r`/net/ipv6/ipv6.ko)
Linux: A single command to *remove* ipv6 (rm
Removing ipv6 support requires deleting the ipv6 module (assuming your kernel has ipv6 compiled as a module, which most distributions do), although it is also possible to remove it by recompiling the kernel.
As for the avahi dependencies, this is an issue with the way ubuntu is packaged rather than an issue with linux as a whole, and stems from other packages which *use* features from avahi being compiled and linked against it.
My gentoo systems don't have avahi installed at all, infact i had to go and check what avahi was.
That disables it, but doesnt remove it.
You can easily remove the ipv6.ko file and it's gone completely... It wouldnt be hard for distributions to split the kernel modules up into several packages.
They want windows desktops and servers to interoperate with linux servers...
Why? because linux has a significant server marketshare, and they are FORCED to interoperate with it or face losing marketshare themselves.
Linux however has very little desktop market share, so it's more profitable for microsoft to ignore it and thus make it harder for people to migrate to linux.
Ever noticed how a lot of the interoperability between windows and other os's centers around those os's implementing proprietary protocols from windows, rather than windows implementing standards from other os's. There have been a few other cases where microsoft have been forced to implement standards to interoperate (tcp/ip, image formats etc) but they have always preferred to force their own proprietary implementations on people if they will stick (netbeui, bmp etc).
It is, not only disable but also remove. On unix this is easy, because everything typically comes as seperate packages which are easily uninstalled.
Windows however, makes it difficult if not impossible to remove many things which are often not required at all.
On the contrary, they should check for the presence of the appropriate feature, and then use it...
They should also let you build binaries without those fallback code paths, as a lot of code will never run on older machines (eg x86 macs, which all have at least sse3).
If someone's system lock up because AMD claimed to support a feature which they dont actually support, that's AMD's fault and intel could claim the moral high ground instead of the other way round.
Not to mention that a significant portion of open source software originally designed for linux/bsd will run perfectly well on osx.
Aside from OSX itself, i dont think i have a single third party piece of software on my mac that wasn't freely downloadable.
The macbook pro uses an ATI chipset...
When running Linux on the macbook pro i also couldn't get dual head working, so there's definately an issue with the linux drivers.
It can include PNG, PDF or EPS format images...
Jpeg being a lossy format wouldnt really be suitable, its ok for real life photos but a very poor format for representing artificial constructs like graphs.
Also, bitmapped images will look poor when printed on a high resolution printer, although you can include a huge image and latex will scale it down appropriately.
Most linux distributions are compiled for i686 nowadays... And those that are not, typically include multiple versions of kernel and glibc packages for different processor types.
Then you have distributions like gentoo, which are compiled for whatever cpu you happen to have.
Also there is OSX, which is compiled for a core duo (the lowest common denominator among intel macs).
Not to mention any 64bit binaries, the lowest common denominator for which is an athlon64.
As for optimizing on the fly with java, I usually leave azureus running for days on end... It's still sluggish, and yet native apps still run fine.
I have yet to see any java application that outperforms a similar one written in C, even if it has been compiled for a generic 386. Compiling specifically for the CPU just increases the gap, and modern compilers arent even very good at making use of sse/2/3 etc.
Then to elaborate...
Support for X11 is poor, there is no dedicated video driver like there is for vmware.
I did the same thing, amiga with 68060 emulating a mac...
A lot of apps hadn't been fully ported at the time, and significant parts of macos were still not ported either, so in many cases the 68060 outperformed the ppc based macs of the time too.
Also remember that, the 68060's raw performance is often better than the first revision of the powerpc chips (the 601).